The oral history is a dicey format, especially when it comes to comedy. Performers famed for their hilarious writing or delivery may not sound the least bit funny when talking about the creation myths behind their own careers.

And when the conversation centers on an unanswerable query, as it does in Yael Kohen's "We Killed," a book filled with the voices of female comics and their colleagues, it's apt to raise more questions than it answers. Kohen's book begins by asking whether women are funny. That Christopher Hitchens wrote an apparently serious essay titled "Why Women Aren't Funny" in 2007 does not make this stupid question any smarter. And after 308 pages and lots of interviews, Kohen confirms what we knew from the beginning. She thinks women are funny, or she wouldn't be writing about them.

Yet she used this specious debate as the hook for an omnibus survey of how comic style has evolved over half a century. It begins with two very different 1960s innovators Phyllis Diller and Elaine May, and ends with the sexual explicitness of Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler and assorted newcomers. Among the nominally big thoughts on offer: Silverman and Handler prove that female comics can be both raunchy and beautiful.

"We Killed" started out as a magazine article for Marie Claire, and Kohen has not found an effective book-length structure on which to hang her collection of rambling, long-winded memories from comic performers, club owners, television executives, talent scouts and writers.

But the sheer abundance and variety of voices does provide a pieced-together timeline. Younger readers might find it amazing that Marlo Thomas had to give ABC's head of programming a copy of "The Feminine Mystique" to help him understand why she could star in "That Girl" as a heroine who wasn't married but lived in an apartment of her own. "We Killed" pivots from nightclubs to sitcoms, paying almost no attention to other kinds of television, movies or written satire.

Even so, its progress is not easy; it requires short, digressive chapters to explain where unusual talents like Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett, Ellen DeGeneres and Merrill Markoe fit into the mix. "Saturday Night Live" is treated as a world of its own, although, as a show that turned 37 last week, it spans many cliques and styles and generational changes: more worlds than one. "Live From New York," the book-length account of the evolution of "Saturday Night Live," is a much better oral history than this one.

Here, as elsewhere, male writers from Harvard are assailed for treating "the girls" dismissively and not giving them enough to do. The worst Harvard-related culture clash that the book describes involves "Roseanne," its obstreperous blue-collar star, and the ballistic response to a Harvard-educated head writer's asking, "What is lunch meat?" That lapse was so explosive that the book dares not cite him by name. "We Killed," which takes its title from comics' definition of success with an audience, is almosts entirely flattering to its subjects. But it's best when reverential for a reason.

Kohen and her interviewees are very clear about why "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was so believable, innovative and funny; why Gilda Radner's example affects so many young women ("I don't think there is a comedy girl that I have worked with whose first comedy crush wasn't Gilda," former "SNL" star Maya Rudolph says); why physical attractiveness can be a mixed blessing for women who want their humor to be heard; and what behind-the-scenes skills were required for women trying to climb the rungs of the comedy-club ladder.

All double entendres are intentional, as when Janeane Garofalo is remembered as being "on 'Ben Stiller"' at a formative stage in her career. "We Killed" would have lost nothing by weeding out gushy overstatements, like "the first time I saw Janeane, I was like, 'Oh my God."' In a book with too much flab and fatuousness, the single silliest comment is about a house in Los Angeles shared by Jack Black, Laura Kightlinger and many friends passing through. There was period of time when the water in the toilet "was just boiling hot for about a month, and they couldn't fix it," recalls someone who stayed there. "It was like this boiling cauldron. Even before that, that's what this house was like: a boiling cauldron of emotion.

" At the end of "We Killed," as much too easy proof that her book has gotten nowhere on the question of what gender means in comedy, Kohen includes this thought from Chelsea Peretti, who has written for "The Sarah Silverman Program" and "Parks and Recreation": "So it's a great conversation to have with your therapist or with your best friend if you are feeling down about it someday. I don't think there's much to be gained from it. All it does is alienate you from other people and set you further aside to talk about it all the time.

No one wants to hear you complain about this or that hardship. At the end of the day, it's entertainment. It's not some civil rights issue, really."

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